Killer Pancake

today. He promised, but he probably forgot. They let you hold the rats there,” he added brightly. “Big black and white rats.”

“I’m sorry, Arch. I’d take you, but I have a ton of cooking to do, and I need to go see Marla.”

Arch lifted the towel from the rising bread, peered in, and poked the dough with his finger. “How is she?”

“Don’t know yet.”

He sighed. “Maybe Todd’s dad could take us to the animal hospital. Their rats don’t bite there, they’ve trained them—”

“Arch, please.”

“I didn’t say I wanted to have a rat, I just want to hold one.”

“Give Julian a little slack, hon. And me too, while you’re at it.”

“I am, I am, but can’t we get another pet? If you don’t like rats, can we talk about ferrets? Tom likes them,” he said with a hopeful smile.

I punched down the bread dough, divided it, and reshaped it in ring pans. “We have a cat. Please don’t bring Tom into this.”

Arch frowned and reconsidered his strategy. “I guess I better go check on Julian. Should I take him some coffee? That doesn’t really count as food, does it?”

“Sure, take him some. If he doesn’t want it, come on back.” I fixed a latte the way Julian liked it, with lots of cream and sugar. Arch disappeared just as Alicia knocked on my door. While she lugged in boxes of Portobello mushrooms and fresh herbs, I called the Coronary Care Unit of Southwest Hospital. Someone at the nurses’ station crisply informed me that Marla Korman had not yet been taken for her angiogram, and that the patient could not come to the phone. Marvelous. By the time Alicia had finished unloading the supplies, Arch had returned, dressed for the day in his tie-dyed shirt and torn jeans.

“Julian’s drinking the coffee and says thanks. I’m going to Todd’s. There’s nothing to do around here.”

“Does Julian want—”

Arch pulled his mouth to one side and nudged his glasses up his nose. “He says he’ll come down when he wants to be with people.” Seeing my disappointed face, Arch patted my shoulder. “He’ll be okay. You know Julian. He’s had a hard life, but he always manages to come through. All right, I’m leaving. It’s been real, Mom.” And with that, Arch strode out the front door clutching a bag of audiocassettes.

Feeling helpless, I started on the fudge cookies. As I sifted dark brown cocoa powder over a white mountain of flour, I kept running the previous twenty-four hours through my mind. If only I had not accepted the assignment for the banquet. Would that have helped? Why had Claire even recommended me to her employers? I beat egg whites with canola oil and measured aromatic Mexican vanilla into the batter. Julian’s had a hard life. No kidding. His adoptive parents were far away, and now the young woman he’d fallen head- over-heels for was dead.

The bread loaves came out of the oven golden-brown, studded with cranberries and nuts, and filling the kitchen with their rich scent. I placed the loaves on racks to cool and called the hospital again. Marla still hadn’t gone for her angiogram and could not come to the phone. I banged the receiver down and wondered how many people had heart attacks waiting in hospitals to be treated.

I spooned even half-spheres of the cookie batter onto tin sheets and popped them into the oven. Ten minutes later, the fudge cookies emerged as perfect dark brown discs that smelled divine. I inhaled the life-giving smell of chocolate and quickly transferred the cookies to racks. While they were cooling, I got started washing the pile of dirtied bowls and pans. I was thinking black thoughts about Southwest Hospital, when Arch returned.

I said, “Now what?” and immediately regretted it. Arch’s face was crestfallen.

“I just … wasn’t in the mood for playing with Todd. I think I should go down to the hospital with you to see Marla.”

I gathered him in for a hug, which, being thirteen, he didn’t return. “It’s okay, hon. I don’t know what’s going on with Marla, and I don’t know who they’ll let see her. If you stay here with Julian, that would be the best thing. Why don’t you try to take him some warm cookies and cold milk?”

“He’s not five years old, Mom. And he said no food.”

“Well then, take him another cup of coffee.” Not five years old. This was true. So at the last minute I poured an ounce of Tom’s VSOP cognac into Julian’s second latte. Julian was nineteen, in fact, but he wasn’t going to be driving anywhere today, and it was my—our—house, and I thought the kid needed a drink.

Arch steadied the cup, took a whiff, said “Blech,” and left the kitchen. Five minutes later he returned, just as I was mixing skim milk into powdered sugar to make a vanilla glaze for the fudge cookies. “Okay. Julian took the coffee and he’s out of bed. He’s just kind of staring out the window and saying, ‘She was so beautiful, she was so perfect,’ and junky stuff like that.” He shrugged. “He didn’t want me to stay, though.”

“Want to help me cook?”

“Sure.” He washed his hands, watched what I was doing, then meticulously began to spread thin layers of white icing over the dark cookies. As I sat beside him icing my own pile of cookies, I knew better than to ask what he was thinking, and why he had decided to come home from Todd’s.

“So,” Arch said at length, “d’you think Julian liked Claire so much because she was beautiful or because she was, you know, a good person?”

I considered the icing on one cookie. “I have no idea. Probably both.”

“I don’t think anyone will ever love me because of my looks.”

I iced my last cookie and put down my spatula. “Arch, you are good-looking.”

He rolled his eyes, then bent his wrist to ease his glasses back up his nose so he wouldn’t have to let go of his spatula. “You’re my mom. You’re supposed to say that.”

Without looking at him, I started to sprinkle cocoa powder over the first row of iced cookies. The dark chocolate cookies with their pale icing and cocoa dusting looked beautiful. My son, the most precious person to me in the world, thought he was ugly. What’s wrong with this picture?

“Arch, I don’t care what anyone says, you are attractive.”

“Uh-huh. Remember the Valentine’s Day dance I went to at Elk Park Prep this year? My first and last dance at that school?”

“But I told you, when you’re older you should try again—”

He waved his spatula for me to be quiet. “There was an artist there. The school hired him for, like, entertainment. An artist who makes people look like cartoon characters, you know? What’s that called?”

I sighed. “A caricaturist?”

“Yeah. He drew caricatures of all the kids. Instead of dancing, we stood around watching him work. He gave each person’s … caricature … titles like Class Hero, Class Brains, Class Beauty. He would exaggerate each kid’s appearance, so that they would be flattered, you know?”

I nodded, unsure of where this was going.

“So then he did me. He exaggerated how thick my glasses are, how dark my freckles are, the way my chin goes in and my hair sticks out. He wrote in big letters at the bottom Class Nerd. Everybody laughed. So please don’t tell me I’m good-looking, when you know and I know and everybody else knows that I’m not.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, sometimes the people at that school just make my flesh crawl—”

“Don’t worry, Mom, the guy, the artist, apologized when the dance was over. Everybody was gone by then, but he did say he was sorry. The dance would have been awful without that happening anyway.” He waved his spatula dismissively. “Looks like all the cookies are done.”

I took his spatula and mine and placed them in the sink. Embarrassed by his revelation, Arch stood up to leave.

“Wait, hon, please. Sit down. I want to tell you something.”

The air outside was heating up, and with all the cooking, the kitchen was even hotter. Arch threw himself into one of the kitchen chairs while I poured us both some lemonade.

“You know I lived in New Jersey during most of my growing-up years.”

“Mom, so what? What does that have to do with anything?”